Opinion

No, I’m not talking about Francis Rossi but the issue of how to achieve sustainability. This came up during a lunch, where my lunch colleague had picked up on my discussions of sustainable finance, and started to debate how we could change things. The issue we agreed is with governments, but government focus upon votes,…

A big area of debate in banking that has been around since the 1990s is how to make banks more accountable for sustainability. I talk about this a lot these days as 71% of all Green House Gas (GHGs) emissions emitted on planet earth since 1988 came from just 100 companies. If we could change…

I thought I would share my speech at last week’s UN meeting and the short version is summarised nicely by the UN’s press page: Chris Skinner, an author and commentator from the United Kingdom, discussed the promise of “fintech” — which integrates finance and technology — to extend financial services to more people in ways…

No, I don’t mean Attention Deficit Disorder, which would be ADD, but I mean Artificially Intelligent with Dumb Data. Now, I know I moan on and on about fragmented legacy systems, but I honestly have no idea how a bank could ever be able to compete with an Apple or Amazon, or even a Marcus…

I was having an interesting conversation with a guy who had joined a big bank having previously worked in Big Tech. The guy was headhunted by the bank to be a gamechanger (GC), and had been gifted the ability to do almost whatever he wanted when it came to innovation, change, ideas and so on…

Talking of partnering, many years ago, I was assigned the role of negotiating a contract with a partner for a large technology firm. The partner specialised in the insurance markets, my focus at that time, and we got into the game of contract wording. For quite a while, it was if you do this then…

I encounter lots of banter about platforms, marketplaces and ecosystems, and do wonder in the flippant way people use them interchangeably whether they really understand what they are talking about. I’m sure many do but I’m also sure some people throw them into the conversation like a buzzword bingo game. Add AI, blockchain and open…

Over ten years ago, I started blogging about cloud computing and financial services. Many banks dismissed the idea back then as “the regulator wouldn’t allow it”. Then the regulator did allow it in some countries, but banks were confused about the regulatory position. For example, if they use cloud services for customer data and the…

Looking at the world of the future, we all wonder what will happen to work. Will we still have jobs? Will all the dumb jobs disappear so we no longer have call centres (replaced by chatbots and avatars); accountants and auditors (replaced by AI algorithms); Uber drivers and hotel check-in staff (replaced by robots); and…

I’ve blogged a few times about Facebook planning to launch a currency … Will Facebook become the world’s central bank? If Facebook launch a cryptocurrency, will US government shut it down? … and the fact that most regulators won’t like it. In fact, there are already questions being asked in US Gov about their plans,…